Wednesday, August 30, 2017

To silence Republicans: 'Call them racists...This makes them sputter with rage,' said top Journolist member 7 years ago. Republicans must be made to live in a state of constant fear, he said. During 2008 campaign Journolist members were outraged if Obama received tough questions-Wall St. Journal, Taranto, 7/20/2010

Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington
Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic
participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in
the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage."

Most damning is a long quote from a Spencer Ackerman, who worked for something called the Washington Independent:

"I
do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It's not
necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright's defense. What is necessary is
to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words,
find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window.
Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas cardto let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant
fear.Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I
think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either
defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the
game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them--Fred Barnes, Karl
Rove, who cares--andcall them racists.Ask: why do they have such a
deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country?What
lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which
in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

Smashing
somebody's [sic] through a plate-glass window seems like an odd way to
thread a needle, but atrocious prose is the least of the problems here.
The problem here isn't bias, either. Assuming Ackerman was an opinion
writer rather than a straight-news reporter, he was entitled not only to
hold his opinions but to express them.

"Spencer,
you're wrong," wrote Mark Schmitt, now an editor at the American
Prospect. "Calling Fred Barnes a racist doesn't further the argument,
and not just because Juan Williams is his new black friend, but because
that makes it all about character. The goal is to get to the point where
you can contrast some _thing_--Obama's substantive agenda--with this
crap." . .

Kevin Drum, then of Washington
Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman's strategy. "I think it's worth
keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he's trying) to run a
campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking
about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the
Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out
he's not going [to] change the way politics works?"

But it was Ackerman who had the last word. "Kevin, I'm not saying OBAMA should do this. I'm saying WE should do this."

If
anybody on the list objected in principle toAckerman's idea of
slandering people, including a fellow journalist, as racist, the Caller
missed that part of the story. (We'll be happy to report it if a
Journolist member would care to supply us with the evidence.) What
Ackerman proposed was to carry out a political dirty trick in order to
suppress the news and thereby aid a candidate for public office. That's
about as unethical as journalism can get.

The final product of this debate was a pathetic "open letter," which, as we noted at the time,
was signed by 41 self-described "journalists and media analysts,"
nearly all of whom were affiliated with universities, left-wing
publications or left-wing think tanks.The letter does seem to have been
more of a collaborative effort than we guessed back then: the Caller
lists eight people who contributed to its drafting. Even so, what
self-respecting journalist shares a byline with 40 other guys?

"The
letter caused a brief splash and won the attention of the New York
Times," the Caller reports, but thereafter was deservedly forgotten
until now. Obama weathered the Wright revelations, but it seems a
stretch to give Journolist the credit (or, if you prefer, the blame) for
that. On the other hand, are there other stories they did succeed in
suppressing? We cannot know as long as the full Journolist archives are
secret.

These revelations also belie Journolist founder (and now Washington Post commentator) Ezra Klein's defense of the enterprise back in March 2009:

"As
for sinister implications, is it "secret?" No. Is it off-the-record?
Yes. The point is to create a space where experts feel comfortable
offering informal analysis and testing out ideas. Is it an ornate temple
where liberals get together to work out "talking points?" Of course
not. Half the membership would instantly quit if anything like that
emerged."